The
Death of Denis
Donaldson
In
October 2002 the Northern
Ireland power-sharing government collapsed following the discovery by
security forces of an alleged IRA/Sinn Féin spying operation
at
Stormont, the so-called 'Stormontgate' affair. In return for an end to
the IRA military campaign, Sinn Féin had been admitted to
participation in government, and it was hoped that the era of political
violence was coming to an end. The most prominent member of Sinn
Féin arrested in 2002 was Denis Donaldson, the
party's principal
administrator at Stormont, in whose home a cache of
incriminating
documents was found by police. On 8 December 2005 charges against
Donaldson and two co-accused were dropped on the grounds that
prosecution was 'no longer in the public interest', an interesting
phrase which was interpreted as meaning that an 'intelligence resource'
was the actual object of protection. Just over a week
later it was revealed that Donaldson had been a long-serving spy for
the British, and it was clear that he had in fact been 'outed' and
abandoned by his former handlers. (1) Having been debriefed by his
former Republican colleagues, Donaldson apparently
felt secure enough to go and live in an isolated cottage near Glenties,
County Donegal. On 4 April 2006 Donaldson was found shot dead in his
cottage, at a time when renewed efforts were being made to restore a
power-sharing government in Northern Ireland. Republican
sources indicated that Donaldson's killers were probably
security
agents
eliminating a man who knew too much, while security
sources for
their part stated that he was assassinated by dissident Republicans
seeking revenge for his betrayal of comrades. Whoever killed Donaldson,
it is clear that he had been employed to serve a murky purpose one last
time, and his secrets are now secure in the grave.
Was
Molloy Childers a British Spy?
A book
published in 2006 on the
intelligence war 1919-21 between the British and Michael Collins's IRA,
by scholar Michael T Foy, features a claim that
Molly Childers, wife of the Irish Republican leader, Erskine Childers,
was in
fact a British spy. (3) Coming hard on the heels of the recent
Donaldson revelations (see above), the claim seemed not entirely
implausible, and aside from a denial from the Childers family, it has
not been generally challenged. Molly Osgood Childers belonged to a
leading Boston
family, and married Erskine Childers before his conversion from
Unionism to the cause of Irish independence. Childers took the
anti-Treaty side in the Civil War which followed the Anglo-Irish
agreement of 1921, and he was
himself accused unjustly of being a British spy by former comrades on
the
pro-Treaty side. Captured in possession of a gun presented to him by
Michael Collins, Childers was court martialled and executed by the new
Irish government in 1922, in what was a clear case of judicial
tit-for-tat killing. The claim that Childers's wife was a spy is
therefore quite sensational, but of course speculative. Foy is quoted
as
stating that the mysterious spy had access to top Sinn Féin
leaders, used 'American-sounding turns of phrase', and that throughout
her life Molly 'displayed intelligence, courage, decisiveness and
single-minded determination'. The question arises
as to why such a woman would choose to betray all that her husband had
come
to hold dear. The spy refers in reports to someone called 'Bob', who
Foy suggests
could have been Molly's husband, his full name being Robert Erskine
Childers. This again begs the question as to how someone seeking to
avoid detection would risk recording a name of someone so close to her.
Furthermore, Foy does not itemise any really high-grade intelligence
provided by his spy, and she appears to have been one of those know-all
operatives, more inclined to tell her handlers how to fight the
war than to provide reliable information. Examples of the spy's
style include an implausible
claim that Eamon de Valera was 'a red-hot extremist' who wished to have
King George V assassinated, and the plainly misinformed advice that
peace negotiations with the rebels were a waste of time. (4) After her
husband's death, Molly
Childers remained the keeper of his memory and a supporter of the Irish
national cause, and in short the claim that she was a British
spy seems to be a very unlikely one.
The Hunt Museum and
Nazi Connections
The Hunt Museum in Limerick holds
a compact collection of artefacts and artworks donated to the Irish
people by the late John and Gertrude Hunt, who were prominent dealers
and collectors. In 2003 it was alleged that the provenance of some of
the material in the museum was suspect and that the Hunts had links
with Nazis and dealers in material looted during World War II. These
allegations were taken up by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which
demanded a full enquiry by the Irish government. The Hunt Museum denied
the allegations, but moved to allay concerns by placing a catalogue of
its holdings
on its website. After a false start when one investigating group folded
due to
funding problems, in 2005 the Irish government funded an enquiry to be
held under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy. This group was
headed by retired civil servant Seán Cromien, and its report was
issued in June 2006. (5) Acknowledging gaps in provenance records, the
group referred to loss of documents during World War II, and
concluded that 'it is probable that most of the objects with gaps
do not have problematic pasts'. (6) Because of his research on
Joyce manuscripts with similar provenance
problems, it seemed to the present writer that the group was being
rather optimistic in its conclusion, and had not dug deeply
enough. The impression of a whitewash if not a cover-up of the Hunt
Museums's unpleasant associations has been confirmed by the revelation
that there exists in the Irish military archives a file detailing a
close personal and business relationship between John Hunt and Count
Alexander von Frey, who had links with Hermann Göring, and
recorded as well are
Hunt's connections with two traffickers in looted art, Arthur Goldsmith
and Emil Buhrle (though it is claimed that the last is a
misidentification). (7) All state cultural institutions should have an
obligation
to check thoroughly and proactively the provenance of material
they
acquire through purchase or donation. An unfortunate aspect of the Hunt
Museum affair is the apparent 'targeting' of the individual who first
revealed the possibility of problems with the collection, and indeed
the present writer is
well familiar with the negative responses of officials whose
judgement in such matters is called in question.
Annie Moore
Annie Moore's fame rests on the
fact that as a fifteen-year old girl she was the first immigrant to
enter Ellis Island in New York in January 1892. She is commemorated by
statues sculpted by Jeanne Rynhart at both Ellis Island and Cobh in
Ireland from where she sailed. It was obviously a matter of interest to
know the details of Annie's life after her arrival in the United
States, and she had hitherto confidently been identified as a person of
the name who had moved west and ultimately died in an accident in Texas
in the 1920s. For genealogist Megan S Smolenyak there was
something not quite right about the story, and she set about examining
the documentation, also seeking the assistance of other genealogists
through the expedient of offering a €1,000 reward for information.
The result was that in September 2006 it was revealed that the real
Annie Moore had now been identified, that she had in fact stayed in New
York, married there, had children and died of heart failure aged 47 in
1924. Annie was buried in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery, and
there are plans to erect a memorial to her. (8) As demonstrated in our
piece on
Molly Malone, it is probably a
prudent thing to hire a competent genealogist to do background research
before calling in the sculptor!
John Condon, Boy
Soldier
The story of John Condon,
allegedly the youngest soldier to die in WWI aged 14, has been the
subject of much media attention in recent years, and there are plans to
erect a statue to him in Waterford. (9) His grave is said to be the
most visited in Flanders. However, there are serious questions
concerning the accuracy of this tale. A webpage at
http://www.cwgc.co.uk/Condonevidence.htm
supplies exhaustive documentary evidence to show that John Condon was
in fact aged 18 when killed in action on 24 May 1915. In particular, a
copy of John Condons's birth record is included, showing that he was
born on 16 October 1896 in Waterford. More than that, it is claimed
that Condon is not in fact buried in the grave in Flanders, but one
Patrick Fitzsimmons of Belfast. As with Molly Malone and Annie Moore,
it would appear that a statue may be erected to perpetuate a myth
rather than historical truth.
Turkish Aid to Ireland During the Great Famine
In March 2010 President Mary
McAleese sparked some debate during a visit to Turkey by claiming in a
speech that Sultan Abdul Majid had sent three ship-loads of food
to Drogheda during the Great Famine in the 1840s. Furthermore, claimed
the President, since that time the coat of arms of Drogheda featured
the star and crescent to commemorate Turkey's kindness. (10) It was
soon pointed out that there was no record of such aid being received in
Drogheda and that the town's arms were ancient, so that it appears that
the President's speech was based on a garbled local legend. However, it
later emerged that there was at least a grain of truth in what the
President had to say, in that a document was exhibited in the European
Commission Office in Dublin in June 2010, which was a letter signed by
members of the gentry thanking the Ottoman Sultan for generously
donating £1,000 to the Irish people in 1847. (11)
The
Drogheda tale can be traced back via Wikipedia and various Internet
incarnations to quotations from the memoirs of Taner Baytok, a former
Turkish ambassador to Ireland, and it is claimed that in 1995 the mayor
of the town, Alderman Frank Godfrey, 'paid honor to Baytok and erected
a plaque in the Westcourt Hotel, which was then the City Hall where
Turkish seamen stayed'. Baytok is also reported as citing an article by
the historian Thomas P O’Neill in a magazine called The Threshold
in 1957, which it would be interesting to locate. (12) There is a need
for further research to establish the full truth concerning
Turkish aid to Ireland during the Famine, which indeed does point to
the potential for good Christian-Islamic relations, but this
research will need to go a little beyond copying and pasting
uncritically from sources such as Wikipedia.
Was Kennedy's 1963 Dáil Speech Censored?
Irish media personality Ryan
Tubridy has written a book, tied in with a television programme,
dealing with US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's visit to Ireland in
June 1963, just five months before he was to die by an assassin's
bullet in Dallas. (13) It was a remarkably successful visit, during
which Kennedy established a special relationship with Ireland
unequalled until the time of his successor, Bill Clinton. There was,
however, one reportedly slightly jarring note during Kennedy's trip, in
the form of an attempted joke which allegedly fell rather flat. On 28 June 1963,
Kennedy was addressing the two houses of the Irish legislature, the
Dáil and Seanad, in Leinster House, Dublin, the former city residence
of the Fitzgeralds, Dukes of Leinster. Whether it was his own
devilment, or more likely that of his speechwriter Ted Sorensen,
Kennedy quoted from a letter written by a former resident, the 1798
revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had noted that 'Leinster
House does not inspire the brightest ideas'. The joke might seem less
than funny to us in the wake of the collapse of the 'Celtic Tiger', perhaps because of the terrible truth it enshrines,
and it is little ameliorated by Kennedy's rider, 'That was a long time
ago, however'. According to Tubridy, 'there was some murmuring and
shifting in the seats', and citing recollections of Taoiseach Seán
Lemass, President Eamon de Valera was said to have
rebuked Kennedy later in the day, stating that 'he had done no service to Irish
politicians by this quotation'. More than that, Tubridy quotes Lemass
as claiming that de Valera saw to it that the offending comment
'disappeared completely', so that it did not appear 'in any of the
records of the speech that have been published', or even in the tape
and film records of the speech. (14)
Here are copies of the relevant paragraph of
Kennedy's speech to the Dáil and Seanad, respectively from the JFK
Library and the Irish legislature's records, both now conveniently
available online:
It can be seen that the offending joke about
Leinster House is in place, unexpunged, uncensored in the official
published record of the Irish legislature. Stranger to relate, the
paper of record, the
Irish Times,
reported that Kennedy's first humorous comment got a 'hearty laugh',
but that 'the laughter was even louder' when the President quoted Lord
Edward as above, indicating that the assembled TDs and Senators could
in fact take a joke against themselves. (15) The story that the most
powerful man in the world had died on stage and indeed had even been
censored in the land of his ancestors undoubtedly made good
journalistic copy, and has now found a berth in
Wikipedia
and other places online. History is an exacting discipline whose
practicioners need to keep critical faculties on full alert and,
above all, to take the time and trouble to check relevant records
before giving credence to colourful yarns which may have little or no
basis in fact.
Wikiplagiarism
There is no doubt that the Internet is a marvellous
method of spreading information throughout the world, opening up
unknown or complex subjects hitherto the preserve of experts and
scholars. Yet we know only too well that the Internet is also a
wonderful means of spreading misinformation. There is another
unattractive habit which has been greatly encouraged by the copy and
paste-friendly environment of webpages, namely, plagiarism, that is,
the presentation of verbatim or near-verbatim transcripts of
the words of another without acknowledgement of the source and as
though they were one's own composition. Wikipedia may be useful for
casual reference purposes, but as students are warned, the free online
encyclopedia's mix of information and misinformation means that it
cannot be safely relied upon and should not generally be cited in
assignments. Wikipedia alas may be adding plagiarism to its existing
problems, as I will demonstrate in relation to some of my own online
work on the eighteenth-century Irish patriot Charles Lucas. Wikipedia's
article on Lucas is composed in the main of a verbatim transcription of
an article in the old and presumably out of copyright
Dictionary of National Biography,
an unsatisfactory approach but one which cannot be called plagiarism in
that there is a candid acknowledgement that this is being done. (16)
However, some additional text has been added to the Wikipedia article
in such as way as to indicate that it is based on the author/editor's
own research, as can be seen from the following screen prints:
A comparison can be made with the following extracts from my online booklet on Lucas (17):
Charles
Lucas was born in County Clare on 16 September 1713, the son of
Benjamin Lucas of Ballingaddy near Ennistimon. . . . . .
Benjamin Lucas died about 1727, bequeathing the
relatively generous total of £937 to his wife Mary and large family, . . . . . Charles, the second youngest son, was allocated £80 . . . . .4 . . . . . Lucas married his first wife Anne Blundell in 1734.9
4 Will
of Benjamin Lucas of Ballingaddy, probated 1728, Prerogative Will Book
1726-28, National Archives of Ireland, 10/2/3, folios 309a-b.
. . . . .
9 Index to Dublin Grant Books and Wills, 1, page 1,030.
In
the process of copying my work the author/editor of the Wikipedia
article did make some textual alterations, for example, 'Benjamin Lucas
died about 1727, bequeathing . . .' changed to 'Benjamin Lucas died
about 1727, leaving . . .'. However, the author then went on to
reproduce verbatim the text of two of my footnotes as indicated above.
This is what is known as 'sources plagiarism', and if it is wrong to
use words and phrases of another author without acknowledgement, then
it is even more unethical to present sources cited by another as though
one had searched them out oneself.
At this point some readers may be reacting with
impatience, perhaps thinking that this kind of thing is done all the
time and that most students, authors and indeed journalists steal
freely in order to get work done. I do not believe that this is
entirely true,
but would have to acknowledge that the practice of plagiarism is
growing, helped by the easy reproducibility of online text. Plagiarism
of work which has itself been plagiarised can now be encountered as
well, so that a Google search will sometimes show chunks of text in a
suspect work appearing on multiple websites, with the original source
identifiable only with a considerable amount of effort. Indeed, it is
probably only a matter of time before genuine authors are accused of
plagiarising sources like Wikipedia, on the grounds that portions of
their writings can be found there, which is why the present writer
is putting down a marker. Wikipedia is aware of the problem of
plagiarism in its web content, but adopts a non-blame approach which
could be interpreted as quasi-tolerance, noting that 'most articles are
written by people with no specialist training in the topic, and with no
academic or professional background in writing, editing, or
researching', so that plagiarism 'is therefore something that can
easily happen inadvertently on Wikipedia'. (18) Of course the standard
defence to a charge of plagiarism is that it was
unintentional, and the problem is indeed probably due as much
to laziness as to poor scholarly ethics. Some practical advice for
all writers: ensure that most of what you write is in your own words,
always give credit to other authors who have provided key information
and where you quote verbatim, place the text in inverted commas and
cite your source in the form author, title, place and date of
publication (publisher as well if you wish), giving page reference(s)
and URL if published online.
Genetically Modified Pedigrees
The mapping of the human genome is undoubtedly one
of the great advances in scientific discovery, promising many benefits
for humankind, particularly in the area of health. DNA analysis is
increasingly important in genealogy also, leading to the new term
'genetic genealogy'. When the paper trail has run cold, so the most
enthusiastic advocates claim, analysis of DNA can enable
researchers to continue tracing their ancestors back into antiquity. In
particular, those who hitherto had ordinary lineages running back only
a few centuries can now pride themselves on being descended from the
likes of Genghis Khan or Niall of the Nine Hostages, acquiring in the
process what might be called 'genetically modified pedigrees'.
News in 2003 that 0.5 per cent of the world's male
population could be descended from Genghis (19) was followed in 2006 by
the revelation that a study by Trinity College Dublin geneticists
had suggested that about 3 million men around the world may be
descended from Niall. (20) A Google search shows how both stories
rapidly entered Internet mythology with only a few voicing caution or
scepticism. While Genghis was a real twelfth-century warlord, Niall was
a quasi-mythological fifth-century Irish monarch. In both cases it is
not at all clear how geneticists could claim to have verified the
actual identities of their subjects' common ancestors. One genetic
testing firm even for a time issued certificates of descent from Niall
of the Nine Hostages!
Genetics
is a complex science, history being apparently less complicated and
indeed not usually dignified with the title 'science'. However, as a
trained historian, the writer confesses that he is appalled by the poor
understanding of historical methodology and rules of evidence displayed
by some genetic scientists who venture into the field of family
history. Whatever about the claim that DNA analysis had established
that Scottish comedian Fred Macaulay's lineage was not Viking but
southern Irish, it seems absurd to speculate that his 'ancestor was a
slave, sold to a sea-lord with the name of Olaf at the great Dublin
slave-market some time in the 9th or 10th centuries'. (21) If the DNA
analysis is correct, it would be more likely that Fred could be
descended from an emigrant bearing the Irish surname MacAuley or even
MacAuliffe which became assimilated to the Scottish Macaulay, these
names having similar Gaelic origins
.
Genetic genealogy can be expensive, with DNA tests costing hundreds of
Euros, and indeed the American Society of Human Genetics cautioned in
2008 that those who 'undergo ancestry testing often do not realize that
the tests are probabilistic and can reach incorrect conclusions'. (22)
While acknowledging the potential usefulness of DNA analysis to
genealogists, the writer's advice would be not to neglect documentary
research and to proceed with the genetic option only if one has the
necessary funds and an awareness of its limitations.
Montgomery and Abbeville
In May 2013 the
Irish Times
announced in connection with the sale of Charles J Haughey's former
grand residence, Abbeville, County Dublin, that historical research
company Eneclann had discovered the late Taoiseach was not the only
'figure of political interest' to be associated with the estate.
According to the newspaper, 'revelatory research' commissioned by
estate agents Sherry Fitzgerald showed that General Richard Montgomery,
an heroic figure of the American War of Independence who was slain at
Quebec in 1775, 'was reared on the estate'. (23)
This rang a bell, and a quick Google search showed
that back in December 2002 historian Eugene A Coyle had publicised the
connection between Abbeville and Montgomery, whose Irish associations
had until then been little studied. Coyle gave a presentation
to the Rush Historical Society showing, according to a contemporary
newspaper account, that the 'Haughey demesne stands on the spot where
Montgomery was born in December 1738'. (24) In 2001 Coyle also
published an interesting article on
Montgomery, significantly titled 'From Abbyville to Quebec', which is
now freely available online. (25) It may be considered eccentric to say
so, but this prior research should have been acknowledged. I took it
upon myself to draw the matter to the attention of Eneclann on 21 May
2013, but they claimed to be unaware of the earlier research. A single
reference to Coyle's article now appears in an online history of
Abbeville compiled by Eneclann in relation to the sale of the
estate by Sherry Fitzgerald, although in my opinion the weight of the
article would have required more prominent acknowledgement. (26)
Eneclann certainly fleshed out the details of Montgomery's connection
with Abbeville, but the company by no means discovered the fact.